Three men and a vote

The contest for the Republican nomination is stuck in the rogues’ gallery stage

Fredericksburg, Virginia

An election year in America is just that — a year. The 2012 race has just kicked off and still has eight months to go, but it is already having a critical effect on me: keeping up with the contest for the Republican nomination makes me want to run away and join the ladies’ auxiliary of the French Foreign Legion.

Choosing the nominee for the out-of-power party is a process of elimination. We start with an omnium gatherum, reduce it to a rogues’ gallery, and end up with a candidate. As I write this we have bogged down in the rogues’ gallery stage. Up until recently, we seemed to have narrowed it down to Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Nobody really liked either of them, but Romney, the Establishment Republican, was the favourite because he was said to be ‘electable’, whereas the anti-Establishment Gingrich was said to be ‘unpredictable, erratic, dangerous’, prone to seethe and snarl like Coriolanus calling the denizens of Republican Rome ‘crows that peck at eagles’ and ‘curs whose breath I hate’.

Gingrich is the Wallis Simpson of the Republican party, who has ‘two wives living,’ as the Archbishop of Canterbury might put it, and is now married to number three. In America, ‘family values’ is the bee in every bonnet and the fork in every tongue but basically it means all things conventional. We had a choice between a conservative who scares us to death and a conservative who bores us to death, and so the tide turned away from the fiery Gingrich and toward the bland Romney, who gives off the distinct impression that somebody started to embalm him and then stopped.